Sunday, May 05, 2013

Now, Kalamazoo Voyager!

by EILEEN JOY

The International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan is fast approaching, so if you have not ordered your steampunk glasses and hauberk, I recommend you do so now. The BABEL Working Group, GW's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and postmedieval are all sponsoring sessions, which are described below, and I invite everyone to use the comments section here to direct our attention to other sessions which you think would be of interest to readers of the In The Middle or just to say, "I'm in this session; come and heckle me!" In the meantime, in order to further our project of a drunkenly deranged medieval studies in which all of our critical faculties are thrown to the wayside in favor of a micropolitics of disruption, revelry, and indiscriminate affection [and maybe a few fistfights and sudden sing-a-longs of Neutral Milk Hotel], please consider yourself invited to the following social events:

BABEL Working Group + postmedieval: Annual Party
Friday, May 10th, 9:00 pm onwards
@Bell's Brewery
*all the beer is on BABEL [wristbands to be distributed at brewery]

I want to mention here, also, that Palgrave has finally agreed to a special discounted price [$49 per year for 4 issues, print + online] for graduate student subscribers to postmedieval, and you can see more about that HERE. Related to that, we are also giving away 3 annual subscriptions [print + online] to the journal via a special Twitter contest, and you can see more about that HERE.

Thursday, May 9th @1:30 pm, Fetzer 1005

THRIVING [roundtable: postmedieval]

The work of Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for the past 15 or so years. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to the valuable role of literary studies relative to the arts of everyday living, eudaimonia [flourishing], ethical community, and well-being, and also on psychoanalysis itself as a "liberal art." Relationality, intersubjectivity, aliveness, resilience, care of the self and also of others, adaptive flexibility, playfulness, shared attention, companionship, healing, and thriving seem, increasingly, to be the key watchwords and concerns of Fradenburg's work, and at the same time, the so-called "literary" mode is still central to these concerns, such that, as Fradenburg has written, "Interpretation and relationality depend on one another because all relationships are unending processes of interpretation and expression, listening and signifying. In turn, sentience assists relationality: we can’t thrive and probably can’t survive without minds open to possibility, capable of sensing and interpreting the tiniest shifts in, e.g., pitch and tone." This roundtable features short presentations on the valuable role(s) that medieval studies might play in the future of the liberal arts, especially as they pertain to "thriving" and "living" and to the ways in which living itself is an art.

Building upon a
series of sessions at last year's International Medieval Congress that
focused on the active engagement to which
humanists must commit in order not to find themselves in merely passive,
reactive, protest-oriented positions, we hope to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape the humanities, and ourselves, in the years ahead.

Karen Eileen Overbey + Anne F. Harris: Field Change/Discipline Change

Aranye Fradenburg + Eileen Joy: Institutional Change/Paradigm Change

Will Stockton + Allan Mitchell: Time Change/Mode Change

Lowell Duckert + Steve Mentz: World Change/Sea Change

Chris Piuma + Jonathan Hsy: Voice Change/Language Change

Julie Orlemanski + Julian Yates: Collective Change/Mood Change

Saturday, May 11th @1:30 pm, Bernhard 158

Plunder [roundtable: BABEL Working Group]

Fifteen of Hrothgar's
house-guards / surprised on their benches and ruthlessly devoured, / and as many
again carried away, / a brutal plunder.

~ Beowulf, trans.
Seamus Heaney

This session features short presentations that explore texts and other artifacts, and/or any aspect of scholarship on the Middle Ages, that engage, practically and theoretically, consciously or unconsciously, in plunder and plundering -- defined as taking, stealing, pillaging, rapine, ransacking, spoiling, piracy, embezzlement, thieving, booty, depredation, conquest, despoiling, desolation, capture, seizure, sacking, looting, and robbery. It is hoped that presentations will trace some of the ways in which "plunder" has served as an historical actant, "making things happen" (for good or ill) that could not be anticipated in advance and which (somewhat and somehow) escapes full human control.

This session features short presentations that explore medieval texts and other artifacts, and/or any aspect of scholarship on the Middle Ages, that engage, practically and theoretically, consciously or unconsciously, in blunder and blundering -- defined as confusion, bewilderment, trouble, disturbance, clamour, discomfiture, turmoil, mistakes, stupidity, carelessness, bumbling, errancy, confounding, foolishness, foiling, stumbling, perturbing, mayhem, fracas, and noise. It is hoped that presentations will trace some of the ways in which "blunder" has served as an historical actant, "making things happen" (for good or ill) that could not be anticipated in advance and which (somewhat and somehow) escapes full human control.

9 comments:

165, Th 7:30, Fetzer 2020: "Productive Anachronism?: the Promise and Peril of Historical Analogy in the Study of Medieval Culture

In the twentieth century, a rift developed between communities of historians who approached the past by physically recreating circumstances and practices and the more institutionally sanctioned world of (largely textual) scholarship. As a result, historical analogy has become associated with amateurism, an over-enthusiastic application of free association, and a tendency to distort the past it meant to recover. But to discard historical analogy—to posit the alterity of the past as absolute—is to lose a valuable tool, and moreover to efface the inevitability of accessing the past through comparisons with our own experience. Medievalists have been at the forefront of efforts to reconsider the analogy as a theoretical model, a scholarly tool, and a hermeneutic. In the twenty-first century, work on "queer temporalities" and "digital medievalism" has suggested a new importance for analogy as the basis of creative and rigorous work in medieval studies. As Caroline Walker Bynum writes, "It is not only possible, it is imperative to use modern concerns when we confront the past. So long as we reason by analogy rather than merely rewriting or rejecting, the present will help us see past complexity and the past will help us to understand ourselves.") In this light, analogy may, in fact, be the only possible way of responsibly approaching the past.

I suspect fewer ITMers will want to go to session 92, Thursday 10am, Bernhard 204, to see "Linguistic Contact(s) in Medieval Iberia I"—but if they do, they will get to hear me talking about the letter X and queer modes of reading.

Rogue art history session at Saturday, May 11 at 10 AM in the Bernhard Center, room 212. We will be recording for Smarthistory. For more details, go to http://experiementsinarthistory.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-rogue-guerilla-session-at-kzoo.html

Thank, Chris, for plugging our session! And I'm fairly sure that some of these participants have been involved in BABEL sessions in the past. In any case, it's true that the spirit of the panel suits the readership of this blog.